The Wooden Nickel

by William Carpenter

  Ronette leans over the low side of the wheelhouse top, trying to hang on to the radome and get her face over the side at the same time. “Hold on to me please, sweetheart, I got to throw up.”

  “Can’t be the morning sickness. Must be three in the afternoon.”

  “Don’t frig with me, Lucky. Just give me a hand so’s I don’t fall off.” He’s got one hand on the white metal frame of the radome mount and the other around her waist as she leans over and heaves it brown and liquid into the blue-black sea. It smells of whiskey and he almost goes sick himself. He’s been on boats since he was born, he’s lived on liquor for forty-eight hours without eating so there was nothing in his body but alcohol, he consumed a bottle of windshield-washer fluid on one cold lonesome drive, but he has never thrown up the contents of his stomach in his life. A couple of last night’s cod chunks swim into his mouth in a sauce of whiskey but he swallows them back down like a hot lunch. When she turns around wiping her mouth she opens her eyes wide and smiles slantwise despite the blue cheese drool and the cut lip. “My God, Lucky, you’re white as a corpse. Your heart still going? You look like you’re already drowned.” Now she’s got tears leaking out through the sea spray. All that dried blood and vomit and caked white salt on her face, she’s still a good-looking woman when she cries.

  There’s a big slurping sound as the cabin bubble busts up through the hatchway and the last of the wheelhouse air farts out through his boothole in the windshield. The cabin trunk’s two feet underwater, whitecaps are breaking right over the wheelhouse roof where they’re both half-seated on the radome now, hoping the fucker won’t break off. The boat settles another half a foot as a swell breaks over the windward side. She howls as their boots fill with ice water but he barely feels it, his feet have gone so numb. “Should of stuck with old Clyde,” he says. “You’d be dangling your toes in the hot tub.”

  “Wouldn’t be pregnant, neither.”

  “Free, white, and twenty-one.”

  She lets go her hold on the bullet holes in the radome and grips on to the folds of his oilskins. Suddenly there’s the aroma of barbecued steak on the wind, steak smothered in warm bubbly A.1. Sauce with a slight touch of gasoline from the rainbow slick forming around them out of the fuel vent pipes. He can’t tell her what he knows, in a minute or two the whole fucking boat will go down, the two of them sucked to the bottom in their clothes and boots. Then she sits up straight. “Lucky,” she says. “Listen.”

  “Don’t hear nothing. Only the wind and waves.”

  “Deaf old bastard. There’s a motor out there.”

  “Ain’t time for the Coast Guard yet. We’ll be lying on that deep-sea ledge by the time them bastards get their pants on, going to be the lobsters’ fucking revenge.”

  Then he can hear it over the wind noise and he instantly knows just what it is. It’s a godawful old Caterpillar diesel turning a bent three-bladed wheel and drumming on the water through a metal hull. “Ain’t the Coast Guard. It’s a fisherman. Steel hull.”

  Then the sound is turning and going away.

  She’s standing up in a foot of water on the wheelhouse top, yelling blindly into the fog. “Over here! Over here, for Christ sake!”

  A big sea breaking over the high side slaps him right across the back. He yells out, “Over here, assholes,” but it’s not half as loud as Ronette and he ends up coughing and panting just like his old man when he died.

  The breeze blows the fog open a bit on the port side to show a high black steel bow steaming right at them, it’s got rust dripping off of every hull plate and a stench of rotten seafood so strong even the cloud of seagulls can’t get close. The minute he lays eyes on it he hears the Caterpillar backing down and the bow swings sidewise so they don’t run over what’s left of the Wooden Nickel.

  Soon as he sees the crew lined up on the bow rail he knows who it is, the whole fucking Trott gang in the stern dragger Rachel T.

  Big black-bearded Captain Anson Trott’s leaning over the rail with a cigar in his mouth the size of a bowling pin. One of the other Trotts has got the helm. They pull up close as they can in the swell and put her in neutral. Now the one with the arm missing joins Big Anson at the rail, along with another he’s never seen before. That may be Carleton Trott, he’s done some racing in a black thirty-footer with a six-cylinder John Deere. The other’s the short squat thick-necked bald-headed little fucker that looks like a dwarf. There’s no one steering, the whole crew’s out at the port rail staring down.

  Lucky shifts his grip on the radome and cups his ear so he can hear Anson Trott over the diesel. Big Anson yells, “If it ain’t my friend Lint out of Orphan Point. Everything OK out here?”

  “Finest kind,” he yells back. “Riding a bit low, that’s all. Too many lobsters in the hold.”

  “OK, big guy, just checking. We caught you talking on channel sixteen.”

  “False alarm,” Lucky says. “Ain’t nothing wrong here.”

  “How about getting your crew off of there, just in case? Then you can take your vessel on in yourself. We’ll see the lady gets home safe and sound.”

  The bald-headed one is grinning and shaking his head, while Carleton Trott starts lowering a red boarding ladder over the port rail. They haven’t got any small boats aboard, so Big Anson goes back into the wheelhouse and backs her down till the Rachel T comes straight to windward, then cuts her in neutral till the dragger drifts down on them and the ladder’s about twenty feet away. They can’t come closer, the Wooden Nickel’s right under the surface. That big steel hull bumps the lobster boat, she’ll go straight to the bottom, no questions asked. Ronette’s already trying to reach for the ladder, but there’s a stretch of rainbow-colored water between the two from the escaped fuel. The one-armed Trott reaches his hook up and drags the orange rectangular foam life ring off of the Rachel T’s cabin top and dumps it over the rail to leeward so the wind sails it in the right direction, but the line on it clumps and fouls and the ring drops into the water ten feet away. Ronette’s not saying anything, she’s got a death grip on the radar mast but the cabin top under them is slanting down more, won’t be a minute till she slides right in. Big Anson creeps the dragger forward across their bow and the bald-headed dwarf coils up the line and lifts the life ring again and flips it towards them with one hand like a four-foot Frisbee. This time it passes by close enough to grab. His feet slip right down the windshield and he’s standing waist deep in frigid water on the high side of the trunk, but he’s got his hands on the big orange lifesaver, which has a net bottom so you can’t slip it over your head, you have to climb in.

  Ronette’s still up at the radome clinging on like a limpet and saying, “Jesus, I can’t swim,” but he pushes the ring against the slope of the windshield and coaxes her feet off the wheelhouse roof, so she lets go and slides down the stove-in glass with a cold splash that blinds him for a second with a douche of salt and gasoline, but she’s safe, she’s sitting on the ring like a swim float with her legs inside the nylon mesh. He’s standing outside the life ring up to his chest in ice-cold seawater, feet braced on the handrails, steadying her with both arms. In the long swells the line first points way up at the big steel dragger, then way down. On their end the bald-headed dwarf’s keeping it taut so they don’t drift apart.

  He turns away from Ronette for one last minute with the Wooden Nickel. His occupation’s gone, along with his kids and the woman he married and the home he was born in, but he promised his old man he’d keep this boat till the end. He hangs on a moment to the only part still above water, then turns around to hop on the orange raft.

  But the raft is gone.

  The bald-headed Trott’s hauling in on the fucking rope as Ronette sails off alone in the life raft towards the Rachel T. She looks back and yells something, it sounds like asshole but he can’t be sure. Then she has to hang on with both hands and look forward as she nears the ship. All four fucking Trotts are up on the high rusty black steel rail laughing their dicks off while the dwarf Tr
ott reels her in. Now she’s alongside the dragger, they’ve got a tackle on the raft line, and the orange life ring rises straight up in the air with Ronette in the rope mesh like they’re raising a halibut. Three Trotts reach out and pull her over the rail while Big Anson throws it in gear. The dragger lets out a black fart of diesel smoke and turns her stern away with the bent three-bladed wheel churning under the miles of cable coiled on the stern winch drum.

  RACHEL T

  Shag Island

  He’s giving them the finger with one hand and hanging on to the radome with the other, it’s the last thing above water except the VHF antenna and the loran whip with the gull wing on it. He grabs the radome and pulls himself back on the wheelhouse roof, rips the wing off and throws it as hard as he can in their direction, but it just flutters into the water while the dragger’s big stern reel dissolves into the fog.

  Marlboros gone, Wild Turkey gone, day’s haul over the side. For a moment, shimmering under the oily surface, the Wooden Nickellooks brand-new, he’s standing there down in Moose Reach in 1970 with his old man and the Alley brothers, busting a bottle over the stem, then all of a sudden they’re flying him back from Vietnam to bury a stranger that doesn’t recall his name, and the Wooden Nickel is his. There’s a thousand nights with so many girls he can’t remember them, then he sees Sarah Peek walking with Clyde Hannaford and that’s it, they’re up on Deadman’s Hill on the bench seat of his ’68 Dodge plow truck, Willie Nelson on the eight-track with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” the big black shift knob trying to get in on the act. She pushes the shift away and into neutral, they roll down into the cemetery among the stones. That was Kyle, then Kristen, and now this new one that won’t have an old man, Ronette will raise it in the trailer with the GMC pickup holding up one side. She’ll bring it back to Clyde, with his Irish setter and his undescended testicle, it won’t be a fisherman but a fucking dealer. Well, that’s where the money is, maybe Clyde Hannaford can save it from this christly life. The sea’s a piss-poor companion, you can’t trust it or anything in it, cold-blooded shadows, they don’t give a fuck.

  The hull shudders slantways underneath him with a burst of gasoline that flattens the water in a widening oilslick circle, the radar mast twists out of his hands and the boat turns so he’s standing on the port side of the wheelhouse, nothing to hang on to, and it’s going down. On the way over he grabs at the loran whip but it busts off in his hand. He yells once into the fog where they vanished, “Cocksuckers,”then he looks down. The sun’s breaking out of the cloud bank now, so he can see beneath the surface. His legs look as short and thick in the water as the legs of that bald-headed dwarf. Beneath them the shadow of the Wooden Nickel catches the sunlight like a long red-and-white fish, a whale, son of a whore shaking with death and anger and bleeding from head to tail. Nice new V-8 engine too, he was coming to like that Olds.

  The last bubble burps out of the companionway and the hull sinks another foot, it’s not going to support him any longer. His skin is frozen and he can’t feel a thing, fuck it, might as well suck water and drown like Merritt Lunt. They say he did it on purpose, his time was come, beats wheezing off in a fucking hospital.

  Only thing is, he wouldn’t have minded meeting that little kid.

  Off in the densest part of the fog bank he hears the Rachel T’s engine, just a rumble at first but growing louder by the second. Jesus H. Christ, Anson’s not satisfied with leaving him there like a bait bag, now they’re coming to run him down. One by one he kicks the trawler boots off in case he has to duck under and swim. He can’t feel any feet there, they’re already frozen stiff. His hands are too cold to pull off the oilskins, there’s two pairs of wet pants under them anyway, his legs weigh two hundred pounds apiece. Then his bare feet find the wooden lip of the wheelhouse top. He flexes them a few times to get the feeling back. He knows the boat so well his toes can feel the rain gutter on the wheelhouse corner, beneath that the bronze bulge of the portside running light, then the snap hook for the life ring that blew off in the storm. He loses contact for a second and floats free, then finds it again, six feet beneath the surface. The dragger slows down and steams close past him, so he can hear their worn-out tappets and the grind of the raw-water pump and, from the wheelhouse, the voice of Garth Brooks, clear as if he’s up there steering the ship.

  Operator won’t you put me on through

  I gotta send my love down to Baton Rouge

  Their quarter wave hits him and his feet can’t find the wheel-house anymore. Astern of the dragger the empty orange life ring drifts downwind right in front of his face and he grabs the safety line with both hands and lets his body float free. He turns around to catch a last glimpse of the red-white-and-blue shape sinking beneath him but he can’t see it, just the plume of gasoline slick where it’s still leaking out from the drowned carburetor and the fuel tank vent. Full unopened pack of Marlboros jammed behind the radar screen, they’re twisting down through the cold green currents along with the wrinkly brown rubber, a cooler of Rolling Rock, the blue curtains pushpinned around the windows, and, hidden away under the compass mount, a high school graduation picture of Sarah Peek. He can imagine the Marlboros swelling up inside, all that wet tobacco, busting the box through at the seams, what a waste.

  Minute she finds the bottom there’s going to be big green lobsters poking around every fucking corner, just how they greeted Merritt Lunt when he went down.

  He looks up and shakes his eyes to focus on the air again. Up on the Rachel T that must be the lobster boat racer, Carleton Trott, grinning like a monkey and starting to reel him in. Beside him is the one with the hook, Harvey, pointing and giggling like he’s at a mud run. Big Anson beams down from the wheelhouse window, pleased as piss with his skippering to drag that piece of Styrofoam right past a drowning man.

  They shut the wheel down so they can tow him up astern. Soon as they get him alongside the dragger reel, Carleton Trott’s saying, “The little lady wanted to leave you for lobster bait, too bad Big Anse wouldn’t let her.”

  “That’s right,” Harvey the Hook says. “Law of the sea says to go back for you, Anson’s a law-abiding man. Har har.”

  The two of them stand there watching him pull himself up on the port side of the huge dragger reel and over the transom. The diamond-tread steel floor feels like sharpened ice on his bare feet. He’s been in the water a long time and his body shakes all over from the cold. Big Anson’s on one side of him now, Carleton’s on the other. They’re helping drag his knees over the steel transom that’s so slippery from fish guts he’s going to slide back in. Big Anse holds out a Mobil cup with something in it: black rum. He takes a pull and reaches the other hand out for a smoke. Carleton Trott gives him a Camel filter. “Bet you thought we wasn’t coming back for you,” Anson Trott says.

  “Never crossed my mind.”

  “Just having a little fun, nothing better to do out here, ain’t found a christly scallop all day.”

  Anson’s got a remote mike on his belt that squawks, WOODEN NICKEL. UNITED STATES COAST GUARD VESSEL SEVEN SEVEN OH ONE.

  Anson Trott pushes the mike switch and says, “This is the Rachel T out of Shag Island.”

  AFTERNOON, CAPTAIN. WE’RE TRYING TO REACH A VESSEL IN DISTRESS CALLED THE WOODEN NICKEL. HAVING A LITTLE TROUBLE WITH OUR GPS OUT HERE. YOU SEEN ANY SIGN OF THEM?

  Big Anson pushes his mike button and says, “The Wooden Nickel’s sank. They’d of waited for you, they’d both be dead. We got her crew aboard.”

  HOW MANY PERSONS, CAPTAIN?

  “Two.”

  THEY SAFE AND SOUND?

  “We’re going to feed them and tuck them in.”

  THANK YOU, CAPTAIN. THIS IS COAST GUARD SEVEN SEVEN OH ONE, ON STATION FOR REPAIRS.

  By this time he’s looking around the dragger for signs of Ronette. The crew cabin aft of the wheelhouse has a steel door to starboard and two round portholes on each side, too salted up to see in.

  “The lady was pretty near froze to death
,” Carleton says. “Zeke’s took her up in the crew cabin to warm her up.”

  “That the bald-headed guy?”

  Big Anson says, “Zeke ain’t bald. His hair’s just real short, that’s all.”

  Carleton breaks into a shit-eating grin. “Zeke’s old lady keeps it short. She don’t use no clippers either. She just grabs onto Zeke’s ears and rubs it off.”

  Harvey Trott doubles up laughing on that one, then waves the hook up and down over his crotch like he’s jerking off with it. That thing must feel pretty chilly on your dick.

  “Guess I’ll head up to the crew cabin,” Lucky says. “Wouldn’t mind a warm-up myself.”

  “I was you,” Harvey says, “I’d knock before busting in on them two. Maybe they ain’t decent. How about staying aft awhile, give them some privacy.” He gaffs another Styrofoam cup off of the stack and splashes it half full with the black rum. The foam makes a sharp screech sliding out of the stainless steel hook, it’s one sound Lucky can’t stand, he’d rather hear a drill going through his tooth.